Now, because we have an inordinately high sense of self-esteem, we’ve decided to blog on our own show.

We chose “Journeyman,” a new NBC show about a guy who travels through time and has a wife that this seems to piss off to no end. (We know this because, before we decided to blog the show, we saw one of the 7,204 promos NBC ran for it over the summer. Once we chose it, however, we avoided all discussions about it in the newspaper, magazines and online We wanted to keep as open a mind as possible.)

Anyway, we chose “Journeyman” because we’ve always been fascinated by the topic of time travel. We hope to discuss it further in the weeks to come –assuming the show doesn’t suck and isn’t canceled after the first week. But by TT, we don’t mean the physical possibilities — wormholes and the like — we mean how TT is handled in popular fiction — books, TV shows and movies. We’ll look at the good and the bad, and believe us, it’s mostly been bad.

Before we start, let’s look back at the TV show we suspect planted the TT seed in our fertile little brains. “The Time Tunnel” premiered in 1966. We were 9. It lasted but a season and, when it went off the air, we gathered signatures from everyone in in Mrs. Mealy’s fourth grand class on a petition protesting the cancellation and sent it to the network (ABC, we think). We didn’t save the show, but we did get, by return mail, a stack of color postcards with a photo of the cast in front of the tunnel.

We think this was the photo:

And here is the first of five parts from the show’s premier episode. Besides the very modern (for its time) opening credits, the episode is a perfect example of TT’s “grandfather conundrum.” Not the one that posits that, if a time traveler went back in time and killed his own grandfather, would he never be born? And so not be alive to kill his own grandfather? And if his grandfather lives, would he then grow up and travel back in time to kill his own grandfather? And so on. And so on…

No, this episode is an example of how TTers in TV and film always seem to land in the middle of some big historical event. Like, say, aboard the Titanic on the afternoon of April 14, 1912.

OK, enough backstory. Now let’s watch the Man who Journeys:

Anyone who enjoys TT fiction wonders how they’d react to suddenly find themselves waking up during the Middle Ages, or in the distant future. Best we recall, was in the novel Time and Again (more on that in future episodes.) In that book, the protagonist feels pain when he wakes up in 1880s NYC. Here’s how he describes it:

Neither of us anticipated the physical shock. I got an arm around Kate’s shoulders and she was trembling. Trying to support us both, I stood leaning against a tree trunk at the curb, feeling the sweat pop out of my forehead and upper lip, and knew I must be deathly pale…

There’s more but that sounds reasonable enough. So we were curious about how JMan would handle his initial leaps to the past. kinda disappointing actually. Is he confused? Angry? Fearful? Check. Check. Check. Would we have preferred something deeper, more meaningful? Check and check.

The first half of the show plays out like something from a standard TV drama. Dan, for reasons yet explained, jumps back in time to complete a task. In this case, save a man’s life so he can marry and have a child. Or not. There are the expected twists as Dan struggles to figure out what he’s really supposed to do while back in 1987, or 1997.

Then, just when we’re thinking we’ve got things figured out, Dan’s one-time fiance Livia shows up. But she’s supposed to be dead. And she hints at the requisite larger, darker forces behind Dan’s sudden ability to TT. In the end, Dan saves a kid from being killed by his deranged father so he can later pull a half dozen children off a burning school bus. (All shown, of course, in full-color streaming video on an iPhone-like device Dan somehow owns on a newspaperman’s salary.)

OK, we’ll go with the deeper, darker forces and we liked the way he proved to Katie that he really was traveling back in time (“I’ll always come home”). So we’ll give the premier episode a 6 on the “TT Rate-o-Meter,” our exclusive system that rates shows by whether TT is an integral part of the plot or simply a device to pump up the melodrama.

For example, on the TT Rate-o-Meter, “Kate & Leopold” gets a 1 while Ken Grimwood’s “Replay” earns a 10.

Episode 1 TT Rate-o-Meter (patent pending) Rating: 6

Time anomaly: Katie’s Y2K reference during the engagement party. While the alarm about the millennium bug had been sounded by the end of 1997, the term Y2K wouldn’t become common usage until later. Although perhaps she’s just an early adapter.

Thanks for reading. Check in every Tuesday for more “Journeyman” musings (and we promise that future postings won’t be this long) and let us know what you think of JMan using the Comment button below.